Searching for answers

Russ Hawkins was the last pilot killed in a string of fatal crashes out of the Region of Waterloo International Airport.

Wreckage

Robert Wilson/Record staff

The remains of the plane owned by Russ Hawkins is searched by his business partner Robert Sigal for any of Russell's personal items after he was killed in a crash last fall.

Puslinch lake plane.eps

Plane crash

Courtesy Hawkins family

Russ Hawkins stands next to his plane, which he was in when it crashed near Puslinch Lake last October. Hawkins was killed and another man survived.

Wrecked plane

Robert Wilson/Record staff

The remains of the plane owned by Russ Hawkins, in which he was killed during a crash near Puslinch Lake last fall, sit in the corner of a hanger at the Brantford Municipal Airport. Hawkins' business partner Robert Sigal searches the interior of the wrecked plane for any of Russell's personal belongings.

Floats

Robert Wilson/Record staff

The floats from Russ Hawkins' plane were heavily damaged in the crash that killed Hawkins last fall.

PUSLINCH — Elvira Hawkins circles the wreckage of her late husband’s small airplane. She pulls back a tarp to peer into the cabin where he died. It’s a dark mess of seats and wires.

Russ Hawkins, 47, was killed when his Cessna 172 crashed into the hilly shoreline of Puslinch Lake last October. He was practising to land and take off from water. A second man on board survived.

The wreckage is in pieces, stored in the corner of a Brantford hangar. The fuselage is dented. The nose cone is disfigured. Wings and tail are propped up against a wall. Damaged floats sit nearby, peeled back by the impact.

Elvira dabs her eyes, red and wet. It’s the first time she has seen the wreckage. The twisted metal seems small and hardly capable of flight.

“It’s very emotional,” she says.

The federal Transportation Safety Board, which investigates aviation crashes, closed its probe by saying Hawkins misjudged his takeoff and chose not to wear the shoulder harness that might have saved him.

But The Record discovered there’s far more to the fatal crash than investigators have revealed in 87 words. Transport Canada initiated a review after the newspaper questioned the safety board investigation.

The safety investigation is silent on mechanical concerns raised before the crash. It does not reveal that the survivor is a flight instructor who was unable to prevent the crash. It does not reveal that the flight may have violated aviation regulations. It says nothing about a cockpit struggle alleged to have occurred in the final seconds in a failed bid to abort the takeoff.

Elvira and the couple’s son Justin are demanding the government investigate the crash more fully, while they ponder legal options and deal with insurance issues the family will not discuss.

“The investigation was so short and in my opinion brief,” Elvira complains. “A person died here. That’s somebody’s life.”

It feels to the Hawkins family as if the aviation community, rocked by six deaths in 11 months out of the Region of Waterloo International Airport, doesn’t want the whole story told.

“It’s almost like ‘Oh my God, we had six deaths in a year, so let’s brush off the last one. We don’t need more trouble,’ ” Elvira says. It pains her even more to be so suspicious.

. . .

Simon Kuijer is polite but firm. He will not discuss the crash that killed Russ Hawkins.

“It’s a bit of a hard topic to talk about,” he says on the porch of a Georgetown townhouse. “He was a good friend of mine. And that’s about all I’d really like to say.”

Kuijer is the last person to see Hawkins alive. They were seated beside each other when the Cessna crashed. Kuijer suffered minor injuries.

The pair flew together a lot. Kuijer, an instructor with the Waterloo Wellington Flight Centre, gave Hawkins his first flying lesson on Feb. 2, 2012. After that they flew together 23 more times according to a pilot logbook kept by Hawkins. For all 24 flights, Hawkins named Kuijer as the pilot in command, while he recorded himself as the student co-pilot.

Kuijer is rated in Canada to pilot single and multi-engine aircraft on land and sea, according to aviation records held by the U.S. government. A website for the proposed Sea Pilot Academy, a business investment that Hawkins was considering, states: “Simon Kuijer is a top level flight instructor with thousands of hours experience in small aircrafts.”

Hawkins was a successful Guelph entrepreneur whose wealth provided him the means to achieve a childhood dream. In January 2012, he bought a used, single-engine airplane for $79,950 with co-owner Tracey Slater, who declined to be interviewed.

“That was his dream all his life,” his widow Elvira says. “He always wanted to fly.”

To become a pilot, Hawkins applied the same drive and focus that made him a fortune in online marketing ventures. He wrote and passed tests. He purchased a membership in a national aviation association. He flew 70 times between Feb. 2 and Oct. 22, gaining almost 100 hours of experience according to a copy of his logbook.

“He would study things and examine things. He would consume himself with it,” business partner Robert Sigal explains.

Transport Canada rewarded him with a pilot’s licence on June 21, 2012. His enthusiasm for flight rubbed off on son Justin, 23, who flew with Russ and who also took flight lessons from Kuijer.

Hawkins stored his 1979 Cessna at the regional airport east of Kitchener. Over nine months he spent more than $140,000 to refurbish it inside and out.

Last September he installed amphibious floats to land the airplane on ground or water. He planned to fly to his business partner’s home on the water in Quebec. To earn a seaplane licence Hawkins needed seven hours of float training, including five hours of dual instruction with an instructor on board acting as the pilot in command.

According to a copy of his logbook, Hawkins recorded his first float training Oct. 13 with Kuijer. It lasted almost two hours out of the regional airport. Hawkins recorded Kuijer as the pilot in command, but never signed the logbook page to certify it as correct.

On Oct. 22 Hawkins recorded just over two more hours of float training. He flew to Orillia to train with instructor Jeff Mavor of Orillia Aviation, the firm that installed his floats. They practised takeoffs and landings (called circuits) on Lake St. John. Hawkins recorded Mavor as the pilot in command.

“He did fine,” Mavor recalls. “I was in control. Of course he was learning. He wasn’t ready to go solo.”

Hawkins quickly departed Orillia after the lesson ended.

“Normally you would debrief somebody and talk about the circuits and talk about what he did right, what he did wrong, where he could improve,” Mavor recalls. “He didn’t even give us a chance to do that. He was very quick at things. He was a very nice guy but just very quick, a busy guy.”

On the day he died, Hawkins juggled his plans. In the early morning of Oct. 25 he cancelled a plan to fly to Orillia for more float instruction, citing gusty winds. He sent Mavor an email: “I’ll stay in Guelph and do some land circuits this morning.”

In the same email he complained that the water rudders steering his new floats were misaligned, causing a yaw (a side-to-side movement of the airplane nose). Hawkins asked if Orillia Aviation could correct the alignment and also complete cosmetic touch-ups. Mavor replied: “Any time you can leave (the Cessna) with us we will tidy up those snags.”

Hawkins went on to the regional airport. He was in touch with seaplane pilot Ron Harper about flying together. Harper lives on Puslinch Lake and was developing the Sea Pilot Academy (which is not operating) with Hawkins. But Harper couldn’t get to the airport until too late in the afternoon.

At the airport Hawkins chatted with Vito Perino, an aircraft maintenance engineer who works out of a nearby hangar. Perino recalls that Hawkins still had minor work to be done on his Cessna, including aligning the new floats.

“He seemed to be pretty happy with the airplane,” Perino recalls.

Around noon Hawkins met with Dale Bragdon, who owned the hangar that Hawkins leased.

“He was interested in building a group of hangars to lease out for an investment,” Bragdon recalls. “He was a very entrepreneurial guy, always shopping for new ideas.” They talked business for 30 minutes.

Just after 1 p.m., Hawkins departed the airport in his Cessna. By now he had arranged for Kuijer, a qualified float instructor, to join him. The Waterloo Wellington Flight Centre says it did not book the flight as it does not provide float instruction. The school would not comment further.

The Cessna had dual controls. Kuijer sat in the passenger seat from which he previously instructed Hawkins. They flew to Puslinch Lake east of Cambridge.

Ken Elligson watched them from inside a restaurant overlooking the lake.

“He’d land and then he’d taxi around the lake and then turn around into the wind and take off again,” Elligson recalls.

The final takeoff caught his attention. “We’re watching him taxi along and he didn’t seem to be slowing down. And I thought if he doesn’t slow down soon he’s going to hit the shore. And then at the last minute he took off again.

“He just barely cleared the trees on the shore. And when he got up above the trees, straight ahead of him up on the hill was a new house. He was headed for that house. He banked to the left to avoid the house and as soon as he banked to the left the plane just flipped over upside-down and went straight down into the trees.

“Everybody said ‘Oh, I think that plane just crashed.’ ”

Kuijer spoke later to Ron Harper about the crash.

“There was a struggle,” Harper recalls being told. “Simon called it. He said, ‘You need to abort.’ Russ said, ‘No, I can make it.’

“Then (Russ) yanks on the yoke. So it’s flying, but just barely. Now he’s got trees to deal with. He pulls back more … Now it spirals down on its back into the hill.”

The Transportation Safety Board dispatched two investigators who reached the crash later in the day. They examined wreckage and interviewed the survivor and other witnesses to quickly conclude what went wrong.

“There was nothing wrong with the aircraft,” explains Peter Rowntree, regional senior investigator. “They didn’t get off the lake in time to clear the trees.”

“It’s human error,” Rowntree says. “We don’t get into blaming the pilot or anybody else. It’s a fact. They tried to take off from a point where success wasn’t guaranteed.”

The safety board concluded its crash investigation with a published summary five sentences long:

C-GBLG, a Cessna 172 on amphibious floats, departed Kitchener (CYKF) on a local flight with the pilot and a passenger on board. At 13:56 EDT the aircraft proceeded to Puslinch Lake to conduct circuits on the lake.

After several successful circuits, at approximately 14:30 EDT while attempting another takeoff the aircraft struck trees and a power line on the southeast side of the lake and crashed into rising terrain. The pilot sustained fatal injuries and the passenger sustained minor injuries. Neither were wearing the optional shoulder harness.

A pending safety notice will urge aviators to wear their shoulder harnesses. Hawkins had a harness, but fastened only his lap belt. He smashed his head as the Cessna crashed upside-down.

“I don’t believe it would have been a fatal accident had he been wearing a shoulder harness,” says Don Enns, Ontario manager for the safety board.

. . .

The Hawkins family raises three key issues in demanding a full investigation:

• Why is the Transportation Safety Board not probing deeper as it did in examining two other fatal crashes out of the regional airport?

• Did the misaligned rudders that concerned Russ Hawkins contribute to the crash? Have mechanical causes been properly explored?

• Why do safety investigators call Simon Kuijer a passenger rather than instructor? Why was he unable to prevent the crash? Could he have taken control in the final seconds?

The safety board acknowledges that its crash summary does not reveal the qualifications of the survivor, is silent on any actions to avert the failed takeoff, and says nothing about regulatory issues raised by the flight. It denies this missing information makes the summary misleading.

“Because we didn’t proceed with a full investigation, therefore we have not written a full and comprehensive report as to what actually went on,” Rowntree says. “The details, although they’re brief, they essentially say what happened.”

Hawkins was not yet licensed to pilot on water by himself or with a passenger on board. He still needed an instructor with him to act as pilot in command. The safety board’s conclusion that Kuijer was not an instructor puts the fatal flight on the wrong side of regulations. Lawyers are now sorting through insurance implications.

The safety board acknowledges that 30 years ago it would have fully investigated to bring out all these details. Today it can’t justify a full investigation for a crash it readily explains as pilot error.

“With budget cutbacks we focus more on anything that’s got a safety issue,” Enns says. “This one here was pretty straightforward as to what happened. He misjudged his takeoff.

“We made the conscious decision that there was nothing that was systemic to the aviation industry that had to be looked at. It was explainable right there without going any deeper into it.”

The ready explanation helps the safety board distinguish the Hawkins crash from two other local crashes it is fully investigating.

“They were certainly more mysterious,” Rowntree says. The other crashes were also commercial flights, unlike the Hawkins crash which was deemed a private flight.

A helicopter instructor was killed at the regional airport in 2011 after failing to manage ice buildup that choked the engine, a full investigation found. A student pilot survived. A rented Cessna crashed into a cornfield in 2012, killing all four on board. That full investigation continues.

Investigators defend ruling out mechanical causes, despite never conducting an extended probe. They found flight controls in working order at the scene. Witness accounts, propeller damage, and the airplane’s success in getting airborne point to an engine producing enough power.

The misaligned float rudder that concerned Hawkins is “a minor deficiency” that just needed tweaking. “It’s not going to cause a crash,” Rowntree says.

Orillia Aviation installed the floats. “I flew that airplane,” owner Jeff Mavor recalls. “It was a great performer. It flew straight as a dime.”

Seaplane pilot Ron Harper is not persuaded. He thought the Cessna lumbered, watching it in flight.

“I was concerned with the performance of that plane,” he says.

The safety board says Kuijer told investigators he joined the fatal flight as an unpaid passenger.

“This is a touchy area for everyone,” Rowntree explains. “The person who was on board, yes, was a qualified flight instructor. But for this flight, to the best of our knowledge and the facts that we’ve gathered, he was on board as a passenger only and not a flight instructor.”

Rowntree figures Kuijer has “nothing to hide. Because there’s no implication to him either way whether he’s pilot in command or not. Planes with instructors on them have accidents all the time. These things happen. It’s a training environment.

“In the end, it doesn’t make any difference to the outcome of the flight whether he was pilot in command or not. It does on the legal side of things. We don’t care about the legal side of things. That’s not our jurisdiction.”

Yet the safety board understands a concern it did not address in its 87-word investigation. How did the airplane crash with a flight instructor on board?

“The experienced flight instructor should have made sure that aircraft aborted the takeoff,” Enns says. “You’re actually asking the correct questions — how did a knowledgeable person allow this to continue? I would suggest that you go directly to that instructor and ask him those same questions.”

Could Kuijer have taken control from Hawkins in the final seconds? Enns sees this as plausible even though it’s not what the safety board reported.

“If I heard that he took control of the airplane to try and avert something, I would not be at all surprised,” Enns says. “Even if we call him a passenger, he’s a very experienced passenger.”

Transport Canada, which oversees flight regulations, responded to Record queries about Kuijer’s role by initiating a review of the crash. This will include fresh interviews.

“Transport Canada has embarked on a review of the information to determine if there were any violations of Canadian aviation regulations,” spokesperson Brooke Williams said. She would not comment further while the review is underway.

“It’s about time,” Elvira says. “I’m glad they’re doing another investigation. That should have been done the first time.”

Kuijer no longer works for the Waterloo Wellington flight school. He has not spoken to the Hawkins family about the crash.

“It would be the decent thing to do, the human thing to do, because he was the last one there with him, just to call us to say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ ” Elvira says. “Anyways, we never heard anything from him.”

While they grieve, Elvira and Justin remember how they first heard of the crash. As news spread in early confusion, it was not clear anyone died.

Though startled, Justin knew his father as a confident, able man.

“I thought I was just going to go pick him up from the hospital and it was going to be fine,” he recalls.

“My mom was crying on the phone and I was like, ‘Mom, don’t worry. This is Dad. This is Russ Hawkins here. He’s going to be fine. He’s always fine.’ ”